As a syndicated newspaper columnist about eBay, as well as a trainer on using Direct Marketing techniques to boost eBay sales, I run into lots of eBayers whose competitors outsell them on identical items. This doesn't have to happen to you!

   To get the most money for auction items you need to get as many people as possible to see your auctions. eBay is huge. That means thousands of buyers at any one time might be looking for exactly what you sell. That also means others are trying to grab those bidders from you.
 
   Every time you put up an auction you'll want to get that auction in front of more bidders than your competition. Here are five ways to help do exactly that:

1. Craft an effective and descriptive (but not cute) title. All search results display auction titles. As many as 99% of buyers use eBay's search feature to find what they want. Before writing your auction title, think of how you would search for that item. If you a specific Grisham novel, you might search for Grisham Last Juror. You're auction gets more hits if you put Grisham in such a listing as well as the book's title. To cover all bases, use John Grisham The Last Juror for your auction title. Such a listing appears in all search results for the author as well as for that specific book. If you have room add NR which tells veteran eBayers you aren't requiring a reserve (an invisible minimum bid price which usually turns off bidders).
2. State the obvious! If it's a John Grisham book, always use the word Book in the auction title. Buyers looking for Grisham books, as opposed to videos and movie posters, will use the word Book in their title because if they don't their search produces all kinds of Grisham-related auctions that are not books. When a buyer wants a Grisham book, you want to make sure that your auction appears in the search list!
3. For higher-priced rarer items, pay extra to post a 10-day auction. Although most auctions run for 7 days, you can run one for 10 days by paying a little extra when you list an item. By posting on a Thursday (never Friday, especially Friday nights which are lousy selling times for auctions to end), this ensures your auction will run over two weekends. Weekends provide the heaviest traffic for buying and selling. The majority of bidders bid the first day and final day of an auction so many sellers use only 3-day auctions to get their items sold fast. By getting sold fast, they give up extra bidders who would see their auction if it were up for more days. The higher your item is worth and the rarer the item is, the more time you'll want to devote to the auction, however.
4. Never use ALL CAPS IN AUCTION TITLES OR ***LOTS*** OF !!SPECIAL!! CHARACTERS!!!! Such auctions look cheap or, worse, remind people of spam.
5. The best deal on eBay is the gallery picture. A gallery picture is a small picture of your item next to your title that appears in searches. If a bidder looks through a list of sales and yours is the only one with a gallery picture, yours will be the only picture on the entire search page. Bidders are far more likely to look at your sale. A picture is worth a thousand words and on eBay, a gallery picture is worth far more than it costs.

Leave your competition in the dust! Maximize your auctions' exposure to get the most and highest bids possible.